DK Land Trilogy
Considering that my channel has otherwise put a lot of time into basically ever DK experience on offer, it's a little weird that I've never played any of the DK Land games. I remember watching FP play the first game as part of one of the DK megathreads, but that was...uh, a long time ago. Too many years, let's go with. So, with not much else going on here at the start of the year, I figured I would stream them and play them myself. They're just Game Boy games, right? Should be a quick and easy way to knock out three titles for this year's list.
Donkey Kong Land
DK Land is almost more notable for what it isn't than what it is. Make no mistake, it has plenty of limitations: some are exactly what you would expect from attempting to condense a detail-rich SNES title down to 4 colors and half the sprites, and some are bizarre design decision that make no sense regardless of format. But DK Land is a surprisingly good standalone experience! For a game that was presumably cobbled together in a couple months between Country and Country 2, it would have been very easy to just be like "Okay, we're gonna do a straight port just to get a handle on working with the Game Boy," (something they did, in fact, do later, but let's put a pin in that for now) but instead, Land is a completely unique game.
And I don't just mean "unique" in the sense that they had to come up with new levels because the SNES ones were too big or something; they thoughtfully redesigned the game from the ground up. It has four worlds of eight-ish levels each, the levels are a good mix of "slightly shorter than the original's for a portable experience" and "longer, but with several checkpoints," and it does a good job of staying close to the DKC1 level design philosophy. It also features several biomes that weren't present in the original: DKC2's rigging levels, a "cliffside" tileset that's technically new but feels very similar to the one from DKC3, and a pair of completely unique ones in the cloudtop and city tilesets. The latter has what is probably my favorite level in the entire game: a level where you have to collect the KONG letters four(?) times because you can press a switch to use them as platforms in the level itself, and while I wouldn't claim that it's a good level, there's a particularly notable one in the clouds that involves a platform that changes directions when you jump on it.
I suppose that what I'm saying is that DK Land is at least memorable. The physics are a little weird, I don't like the save system (there's no Candy Kong - you can save the game after any level in which you collect all the KONG letters), and even playing the game blind, it's not to hard to finish up in 2-3 hours of dedicated play. But those 2-3 hours are pretty good! It's a neat little game that gives off DKC "1.5" vibes, and it's probably the high point of the trilogy.
Donkey Kong Land 2
I cannot, in good faith, tell you that I could ever judge DKC2 fairly; I would like to say that I could make a pretty convincing argument that it's still one of the best platformers ever made, but that's a conversation for a different day. Still, the game is so ingrained in my childhood that I know more or less every inch of the game by heart, and that's something you just can't compete with. So, imagine my surprise when we're getting set up for streaming, and I boot the game for the first time, only to be met with this.
Look at how they massacred my boy.
Where Land 1 was an interesting game because it was functionally an original title, Land 2 runs as far as it can in the opposite direction. Everything about it is designed to remind you of its SNES big brother, and it is genuinely impressive how they've managed to compress most of the Country 2 experience into a GB cart. Huge chunks of the graphics are taken verbatim, most of the soundtrack is here, and all the levels from the original are present, complete with bonus barrels, DK coins, and every animal buddy from the original. They even managed to improve on the physics from Land 1, as Land 2 feels much closer to the SNES version (minus some nitpicks about projectiles). It is a technical marvel of a port, and Rare deserves kudos for getting the game to where it is.
Unfortunately, all this work put into chasing the SNES original is also the game's downfall. The aesthetic is the most obvious point of failure, as both the soundtrack and graphics take the brunt of the Game Boy's limitations. While it's probably not helped by the Super Game Boy borders, Land 2 is just an ugly game. The backgrounds are from something that was obviously much higher resolution, and when it attempts to capture that missing detail, it usually just ends up looking empty, like in the pirate ship and roller coaster levels. The soundtrack is a pale imitation of the original, and while Grant Kirkhope did an admirable job converting them to the GB soundfont, it does admittedly have an air of "You never stopped to consider if you should".
But more than anything, the experience feels the same. With the exception of a very small handful of levels (most notably Bramble Blast being moved to Krazy Kremland), Land 2 features the same worlds and the same levels in the same order as Country 2. To their credit, the actual levels are unique, but they still follow the same design as their SNES original; Red-Hot Ride isn't the exact same Red-Hot Ride as in Country 2, but it is a level where you ride a bunch of balloons over lava. Where Land 1 was free to experiment with weird and new gimmicks (like the KONG letter platforms), Land 2 is chained to whatever they came up with for Country 2, so even their unique ideas are still just iterations on existing ones. The only exceptions to this are levels where technical limitations made the original level impossible - Haunted Hall can't spare the sprites to chase you, so it's just another random coaster level instead. Castle Crush's scrolling can't be done on the Game Boy, so it's just Diet Chain Link Chamber now. Perhaps most damning is that it took us until Fiery Furnace in the Lost World (which is only accessible once you have all 47 Kremkoins in this game) to see a level that was just doing its own thing, completely independent of what Country 2 had done - and its combination of barrel cannons and the rideable balloons is the only level in the entire game that I have a distinct memory of.
The bottom line here is that while "Pretty good, considering the limitations of being on the Game Boy" is a valid and true statement for both Land and Land 2, Land 1 takes that sentiment in a far more interesting direction. From beginning to end, Land 2 is nonstop reminders that I could have been playing Country 2 instead, and I probably would have had a lot more fun with it.
Donkey Kong Land 3
If Land 1 is "Basically DKC1.5" and Land 2 is "DKC2 but worse at all times", then Land 3 is the happy medium between the two. In terms of structure, it's actually closer to the DKL2 playbook; there are no unique tilesets, and for the most part, it's doing its best to compress the DKC3 graphics down to GB-level assets. However, it succeeds where Land 2 fails for two major reasons. First, the Game Boy Color is doing a lot of heavy lifting with properly colored sprites and backgrounds, as opposed to...whatever the hell Land 2's Super Game Boy pallet was supposed to be. But second, and far more importantly, it does not spend every minute of its runtime reminding me that I could be playing DKC3 instead - while the tilesets and level themes are taken from DKC3, they are never taken verbatim, nor do they share any level or world names. World 1 may look similar to Lake Orangatanga, sure, but it's called Cape Codswallop and has levels like Red Wharf and Total Rekoil that appear in a totally different order than in DKC3. While a similar change probably wouldn't have made Land 2 a good game, it would have gone a long way toward reducing that "samey" feeling that it exudes.
It's not all sunshine and roses, however. I won't claim that I've ever been that fond of the toboggan, but it does not play well in Land 3. I can't think of too many instances of DKC Hitboxes™ I've seen over the course of the three games, but the sled is clearly the worst of them so far. Bouncing on an enemy is a dicey proposition, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the only level we got seriously stuck on in the first 3 1/2-ish worlds was the one that forced us to ride the damn thing. I was particularly fond of an otherwise completely normal rooftop that would hurt you when you went over the center of it, for reasons no one even tried to explain. Beyond that, the bosses have almost universally gotten a downgrade - most of them for understandable technical reasons, but downgrades all the same. Arich and Kaos are the same fight, albeit with a much smaller sprite, but Barbos sits on the edge of the screen (so they only had to render half of his sprite???) and since the GBC can't do layers like the SNES, Bleak is given an extremely cursed sideways sprite, but is otherwise the same fight.
Entry into the Lost World requires collecting the DK coins this time, but really, it's a moot point. You'll need at least 60 Bonus coins to get all the available DK coins thanks to the Bear Brothers' card minigame, and you can't fight K. Rool Round 2 until you collect everything. And honestly? Land 3's Lost World is pretty disappointing. While the game as a whole isn't very difficult to start with (whether that's due to technical or design limitations is left as an exercise to the reader), the Lost World feels especially weak - what's supposed to be an endgame challenge feels more like they grouped together a bunch of levels that were otherwise going to be cut and were like "eh, good enough, ship it."
Donkey Kong Country
And that brings us full circle to Donkey Kong Country. After three mostly-successful original handheld games, they finally broke down and just ported the original to GBC. Released in November 2000 (3 years after Land 3, and about 9 months after the JP-only GBC port of Land 3), it is surprisingly faithful to the SNES original! Given the limitations that we saw in the Land games, I was fully expecting the levels that play with lighting (Stop and Go Station, Loopy Lights, etc) and the ones that have chasing sprites (Millstone Mayhem, Temple Tempest, etc) to have some kind of major change but...they don't! Sure, the millstones that Gnawty rides are comically small in comparison to the original, but this is DKC in its entirety, with only very small concessions made to the GBC's limitations. And it looks fantastic to boot; DK and Diddy's sprites aren't great (the faces, especially) and the animal buddies are a mixed bag, but by and large this is about as close to SNES levels of detail you can get on the Game Boy - no small feat when you're working with about 40% of the screen real estate.
As with Land 2, hewing so close to the the SNES original raises some inevitable questions about why you would choose to play this game, specifically. On one hand, it has a better excuse than Land 2 does: this is explicitly a port of Country 1 (rather than a unique game taking inspiration) so it makes sense that it does everything it can to be the original. But that sword cuts both ways - Land 2, even though it was disappointing in how closely it followed the DKC2 blueprint, still featured a complete set of unique levels. DKC GBC is Donkey Kong Country But Worse™, full stop. How much worse is up for debate, and I'll freely admit it's a lot smaller of a gap than I had initially imagined, but it's inarguable that it is the lesser experience between the two. I'm not sure why Rare would come back and do a straight port, years after they had already done original titles, but maybe Nintendo needed to fill the release schedule with something given both the GBA and Gamecube were on the horizon.
Anyway, that's way too many words about a series of children's games about a monkey that jumps on crocodiles, but I really did enjoy going through these. They're good games! Even the ones that aren't very interesting are still technically really impressive, and we had a great time playing through them. You can find all the stream archives here if you want to see the actual games being played, or simply watch us lose our minds in Chimp Caverns as we spend half an hour on the incredibly-named "Necky's Nutmare".